Affiliate links are advertisements, the best kind, they have a call to action "buy this" and a built in tracking mechanism. When you watch CSI on television and they drink pepsi (not coke, not generic cola) that creates a link in your brain that the 'cool kids' on CSI drink pepsi, and a billion studies have shown that this influences peoples choice when they are sitting in the soda aisle at the store buying soft drinks.
She writes a blog, it has loyal readers, she recommends things. People who click on her recommendations and buy them sends her money. Similar studies have shown that when the amount of 'reward' you get from your actions is easily tied to those actions, you modify your actions to maximize your reward, even without thinking consciously about it.
That is why journalists try to put an impermeable wall between the money they are paid, and what they write. They are no more incented to write good things than they are bad things, they are more likely to write the truth as they see it.
She is on record as preaching independence for financial gain, and yet has set up her blog such that she can shade her words to increase or decrease the financial return. So she lies. Probably to herself as much as anyone else, I mean most folks don't start out trying to lose their integrity, it happens slowly over time.
One day she will wake up, reading a column she wrote with a glowing take on a complete piece of crap book with a high resale price because her declining readership is returning less and less money and her need to pump up the sales to cover her bills that just won't go away.
This has caused nervous breakdowns in people, when the fiction they have carefully woven inside their own head to cover their journey down the road into hell suddenly breaks down. Athletes who "don't do steroids" but that one time they needed a bit of HGH to heal up in time for the All Star break or get ready for spring training, a way to just be more of themselves during the post season, not cheating right? They would be this strong/healthy/whatever with regular workouts and physical therapy but the timing is just off, it's not cheating it's just dealing with the schedule that is imposed. The financial trader who just needs a bit more focus on this one day and decides to pop an Adderall or truck driver that does a bit of cocaine to get through just this month's deliveries.
If it were a new story, it might be interesting but it isn't. Its a sad story. It ends badly. And this article gives as good a narrative as any about how these stories start.
Your comment is quite possibly the biggest, most sensationalist jump in logic I have seen on this website. So, because she includes affiliate links in her website (which would have probably linked to Amazon or another seller anyway) she is on a downward spiral to an inevitable and shameful collapse of her readership akin to a truck driver abusing cocaine? What?
You say her story is sad. I'd say your view on life, thinking anyone who neglects to adhere to your strict standards of supplementing income is doing so out of bad faith and a loss of integrity, is the real sad story.
Perhaps we've heard a different number of stories. Have you ever watched a 'monster of the week' type television show in its third, fourth, maybe fifth season? Come to the realization that the plot points, the progression, all sketch a common framework from beginning to end?
I've known a lot of people in my life, I have watched a number of careers start, peak, and end. After a while you recognize them when you see them. Did you read any of the Jason Leher coverage? Did you follow the follies of Shirley Hornstein?
The common thread is that someone lowers the integrity cut-off bar on their own behavior for what seem to be perfectly justifiable reasons, and it works out better than they anticipated. That knowledge eats that them until they do it again, and again, and again.
I observed Maria Popova's story, from the perspective of ever decreasing levels of integrity, reads just like that. I don't know how her story will end up of course, sometimes people pull out of it and get themselves back into the right as it were.
I'm curious why you consider that observation sensationalist. Is it because I asserted it is widely applicable across a variety of people and situations, or something else? Is it sensationalist to say that a dropped apple falls because of gravity and that same principle keeps the moon in orbit?
The problem with your prediction is that you assume what she is doing is lowering her integrity, and the criteria you are using to determine this is entirely your own.
Seriously? Comparing the author of a blog who solicits donations as well as uses affiliate links to someone who falsified their employment history and photoshopped their head into pictures with celebrities? And then you extrapolate those few datapoints you have to represent everyone who has ever "lowered" (by your standards, of course) their integrity?
> I'm curious why you consider that observation sensationalist.
Comparing a blog author using affiliate links to a truck driver abusing drugs or an athlete using steroids is pretty sensationalist. Those examples bring a bunch of extra baggage: a truck driver abusing cocaine is driving impaired and doing something incredibly illegal.
"The problem with your prediction is that you assume what she is doing is lowering her integrity, and the criteria you are using to determine this is entirely your own."
I'm going to assume you actually read the article. In that article Ms. Propova espouses to The Guardian the need for journalistic independence, she labels her site 'advertising free" and she uses ads in the form of referral links to support her web site.
When presented with the difference between what she was saying and what she was doing, she dissembles and rationalizes affiliate links as not being advertising. She knows that isn't true, she ran affiliate link farms before she ran this blog [1].
So she is lying. I gave her the benefit of the doubt that she wasn't intentionally being a swindler (she may be but this article doesn't provide enough evidence to support that) and by that reasoning I interpreted her actions which were at a lower standard of integrity than her words to The Guardian as 'lowering her integrity.'
You under sell the reality with this comment:
"Comparing the author of a blog who solicits donations as well as uses affiliate links to someone who falsified their employment history and photoshopped their head into pictures with celebrities?"
The integrity issue isn't with here using affiliate links and soliciting donations here, the integrity issue is attempting to create a perception through lying to benefit herself financially. Had she written on her blog, "This blog is funded by donations and from what ever I make from the affiliate links" or had she written "Note that when you buy an item from amazon by clicking the links here it helps to support my blog, I am also supported by generous donations from people like you." Or something similar, that would be clear. But it would also result in fewer donations which would cut into her income stream. She seems to have demonstrated that with the whole banner-free / non-ads switcheroo and back again. The integrity issue is that she is lying to get more money.
And what did Shirly Hornstein do? She lied about who she knew or who she could make introductions to. Why? Because people who believed that lie did things for her, and helped support her in a lifestyle she believed she deserved. Back before Shirly was photoshopping herself into candid snapshots she was just telling a few white lies to get past the barriers. If you compared her actions then, with Ms. Popova you would be hard pressed to see any difference in the 'level' of integrity loss.
And that was my point, it starts small, it gets out of hand, and it ruins people. Did you watch the interview Lance Armstrong did with Barbara Walters? Did you see why he cheated? How he rationalized his need to "get healthy" and how "others were doing it."
Did you not hear the same plot points in his story? Did you not see his own self belief that it all started out so innocently? Did you listen to any of the testimony on the steroids scandal before Congress? Story after story after story, "It was a small thing" followed by "just one more time" followed by "I had to keep up" followed by "it ruined my life."
Then there was this point:
"Comparing a blog author using affiliate links to a truck driver abusing drugs or an athlete using steroids is pretty sensationalist."
I'm not sure we'll agree here but that is ok, I see the same story in all of them, whether or not you read about it or hear about it depends on your relationship to the people in the story and their relative visibility, but that doesn't make it a different story. Lots of people cheat on their spouses because they are enthralled by an engaging and attractive person, happens all the time, and it happened to General Petraeous. The latter was a "big scandal" because he was the Directory of the CIA, but the story? He let his dick call the shots. That isn't sensationalism, its just sad.
"a truck driver abusing cocaine is driving impaired and doing something incredibly illegal."
I take if you've never used cocaine, it doesn't impair you like alcohol or marijuana might. When I was going to school it was a problem on a par with illicit ADHD drugs today and for much the same reason. I knew several people who used it regularly to keep their energy level up and their concentration sharp, unless you knew they were using you would just think they were smart and quick witted with boundless energy. These days [2] Truck drivers would probably stick with Red Bull or over the counter drugs to avoid tripping up on a drug test.
[2] "In the 1980s the administration of President Ronald Reagan proposed to put an end to drug abuse in the trucking industry by means of the then-recently developed technique of urinalysis, with his signing of Executive Order 12564, requiring regular random drug testing of all truck drivers nationwide, as well as employees of other DOT-regulated industries specified in the order, though considerations had to be made concerning the effects of an excessively rapid implementation of the measure." -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truck_driver#Truck_driver_probl...
She writes a blog, it has loyal readers, she recommends things. People who click on her recommendations and buy them sends her money. Similar studies have shown that when the amount of 'reward' you get from your actions is easily tied to those actions, you modify your actions to maximize your reward, even without thinking consciously about it.
That is why journalists try to put an impermeable wall between the money they are paid, and what they write. They are no more incented to write good things than they are bad things, they are more likely to write the truth as they see it.
She is on record as preaching independence for financial gain, and yet has set up her blog such that she can shade her words to increase or decrease the financial return. So she lies. Probably to herself as much as anyone else, I mean most folks don't start out trying to lose their integrity, it happens slowly over time.
One day she will wake up, reading a column she wrote with a glowing take on a complete piece of crap book with a high resale price because her declining readership is returning less and less money and her need to pump up the sales to cover her bills that just won't go away.
This has caused nervous breakdowns in people, when the fiction they have carefully woven inside their own head to cover their journey down the road into hell suddenly breaks down. Athletes who "don't do steroids" but that one time they needed a bit of HGH to heal up in time for the All Star break or get ready for spring training, a way to just be more of themselves during the post season, not cheating right? They would be this strong/healthy/whatever with regular workouts and physical therapy but the timing is just off, it's not cheating it's just dealing with the schedule that is imposed. The financial trader who just needs a bit more focus on this one day and decides to pop an Adderall or truck driver that does a bit of cocaine to get through just this month's deliveries.
If it were a new story, it might be interesting but it isn't. Its a sad story. It ends badly. And this article gives as good a narrative as any about how these stories start.